We live in an increasingly volatile, reactionary world – calls to violence have become so commonplace and one wonders if anyone ever stops to think about how every step in the wrong direction has a devastating effect on countless of lives, many of which they can choose to simply look away from. Everyone is guilty of it – the common person, the state machinery, and even the film industry – for the past decade, Bollywood has welcomed several propaganda pieces that leave no place for nuance or sensitivity.
In such a time, Ground Zero is both a breath of fresh air and a brutal reminder of a suffocating reality, especially since the film now exists in a context nobody wished for it to exist in – it released on 25 April, three days after the Pahalgam terror attack, a stark reminder of the fragility of peace, especially in the land the film is set in.
The makers couldn’t have possibly imagined that the film would release in a time marred with palpable grief and rage. And yet, the film, because of its sensitivity and attempts at authenticity, stands its ground.
Ground Zero is inspired by the story of the Border Security Force (BSF) operation that led to the killing of a Jaish-e-Mohammed commander Ghazi Baba who played a key role in the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, told through the lens of BSF officer Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey aka Naren. It takes some creative liberties.
It isn’t a compact film but it’s layered and dense in a way that holds your attention throughout, all while treating its story as a slow burn. Ground Zero isn’t like most other action films, ever eager to step into the action and build a hero’s story. Instead, it takes its time to build the story of the Valley, of a father promising his daughter change in the form of a Santa Claus.
The movie opens in 2001 Srinagar where Naren and his colleagues are dealing with a ‘pistol gang’, earlier introduced to the audience through an armed insurgent giving young men weapons and orders.
Naren makes it his mission to find the mastermind, one they know only through his voice as it crackles through receivers and codes, all while his colleagues lose their lives around him. The violence gets too close to home, often happening in lazy market streets, tourist spots, and outside a school.
The movie is imbibed with such a heavy sense of tension – kudos to the inconsistent but mostly effective background score – that it’s difficult to sit back even for a second.
Constantly, Ground Zero sidesteps genre conventions, giving the audience a protagonist who thinks before he acts (a rarity in Bollywood). When a handler trains a gun at him, he is enraged but not reckless – he takes a step back in empathy.
The film doesn’t paint the valley in broad strokes – a Muslim shopkeeper offers free sweets and a place to rest to BSF officers he sees every day, a young man lets go of the gun in favour of becoming a police mole. One would expect the film to pick up pace then but it doesn’t – instead, even in moments, of action, the narrative constantly pauses as a reminder of the lives the film is capturing.
Naren, despite his posting or empathy, is an outsider and so are the people around him, made obvious by the multiple different accents one hears throughout the film. However, Naren is a man who remembers this difference and morphs it into empathy – for the people of Kashmir. Naren’s own fight isn’t just with insurgency; it’s also with the bureaucracy and red tape, and senior officials who don’t take him seriously. His fight is with a top brass and a media that are quick to slap labels while someone else – a mourning family for instance – bear the brunt.
What Naren’s colleague sees as indifference or defiance, Naren sees as exhaustion – of a people caught in the middle of violence, politicians, narratives they can barely control. With this balance, even if it struggles to maintain it at times, the film builds a complex story by cutting out the chest-thumping jingoism we’ve come to expect. And with Kamaljeet Negi’s able lens set on a gorgeous landscape and tense violence with equal focus, the film comes alive.
There are moments where the film falters – some moments feel too structured for a reaction which is a pity from a movie that otherwise manages to seamlessly transfer emotions from the screen. These moments come in especially in the second half where the action is dialed up and there are moments the film doesn’t have the chance to explain or properly look into. Even when intelligence officers from Delhi (Zoya Hussain as Adila and Rahul Vora) step into the story, some of the tension feels rushed.
The film’s two halves feel unevenly paced, especially when put together. It’s clear that the makers are trying to get to the climax sequence and that rush becomes evident. The sequence itself is incredibly rousing and effective (barring a misplaced background score).
Ground Zero is bolstered by the performances, especially Hashmi. His performance is so incredibly vulnerable and measured that he becomes part of the film’s very fabric – Emraan Hashmi falls away and reveals Dubey. The layers added to his character play out well too – he makes mistakes and he is burdened by the consequences, even as he walks into every day with a renewed courage.
The film doesn’t hesitate to admit that courage can co-exist with fear and insecurity and it does wonders for the character. This same deft writing doesn’t make it to most of the other characters though – Sai Tamhankar, while impressive as Dubey’s wife, gets a short end of the stick. Even his senior (Mukesh Tiwari) and Vora’s characters are written with the same, basic nature and almost morph into each other.
The film, despite all its highs, needed better writing and a much tighter hand when it comes to balancing two halves that essentially feel like two different films united by a single theme (it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds).
Ground Zero doesn’t ask many overwhelming questions because the film exists in the recognition that a lot of questions it’s going to lead to are near-unanswerable. What is one even supposed to say?
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